115. How I Found Food Freedom *Life Changing*

In this podcast, I'm sharing how I finally found freedom with food (while still allowing myself to change my body down the road). I truly hope this helps you change your life for the better!

Leave questions or comments below - I would love to hear from you!

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DIGITAL RESOURCES!⤵️

FREE training: 4 Steps to Stop Obsessing About Food: https://bit.ly/FFEmasterclass

$11 TRAINING: How I stopped my non-stop Overeating (while keeping my favorite foods in the house): https://jessiegolden.thrivecart.com/overeating-training/ 

$27 TRAINING: Maintenance Masterclass: learn whether or not you're really under-eating & how to prepare your metabolism for sustainable fat loss! https://jessiegolden.thrivecart.com/maintenance-masterclass/ 

COURSES:

Food Freedom Evolution: finally get off the yo-yo dieting & food obsession hamster wheel. https://bit.ly/ffeYT 

Sustainably Lean Academy: get lean while keeping your sanity (+ love of food!) and KEEP IT OFF - no tracking required! https://bit.ly/SLAcourseYT 

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Come connect with me!

- INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/jessiemgolden

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome back. My name is Jessie Golden. And in this video, I'm going to be sharing with you how I found freedom with food. And if you're looking for an approach that will tell you, you can never lose weight ever again, you can never try and change your body. Everything has to be in the anti diet camp.

This is not going to be the video for you. Instead, my approach is about giving you autonomy again, giving you your freedom and your peace back. And I'm going to walk you through exactly how I did that. 

Let's start with a bit of a background. So I started my first diet when I was 16 years old. Atkins was all the rage back then. This is when I was in obviously high school. And so I developed this. sense of obsession with low carb dieting. I lost weight quite quickly, received a lot of positive affirmation.

So it became a game to me almost of how much control can I gain? If I change this, my body changes, then people love me more. Therefore, I need to closely monitor my carbohydrate intake. Also at this time, everyone was saying, not everyone, [00:01:00] but a lot of loud voices were touting the idea that carbs. were the source of all ill health, all weight gain.

This is how the body works. Come to find out many, many years later, that is not at all true. It's about energy balance, calorie balance, but nonetheless, this obsession with carbs really took over my life. And this was exacerbated when I went to college, there was a lot of drinking, a lot of binge drinking.

So on the weekends, it was a free for all during the weeks. I was very restricted, very controlled. Really tried my best to control everything and then of course as is natural the weekends would come The cycle would continue and did drinking heavily contribute to this 1 

Now, the thing is during this time, the more I controlled and the more I obsessed, the more weight I gained, the more erratic my habits became and the more out of control I felt. And it wasn't until I was 21, I stumbled upon meditation. I walked into a college class feeling very anxious because of my hangover from drinking the night before, went home, googled natural remedies for [00:02:00] anxiety, discovered meditation.

And that was my first introduction to realizing that we are not our thoughts. We can simply observe them. And I meditated right then and there had never felt anything like it. And I thought, okay, this is something that might change things for me. But of course, as life goes, usually takes many, many times of life, the universe hitting us over the head.

And I completely forgot about that experience. And it wasn't until I was graduating college and I moved home to live with my parents while I studied for my CPA exam, I was a public accountant in a former life. And during those four months of living at home with my parents, I stopped the binge drinking.

I still imbibed in alcohol. I wasn't sober or anything like that. However, I left behind the binge drinking for that period of time. My nervous system was regulated for the first time in a very long time because I wasn't having these huge pendulum swings. My lifestyle was very consistent. I did a lot of yoga during that time.

All I did was walk. I was not focused on my body and that was very intentional. During that time I said, I am so [00:03:00] exhausted from thinking about food and my body and nothing is working. All that's happening is everything is getting worse. So I'm just going to see what would happen if I would just Listen to my body.

Keep in mind. This is prior to all of the rhetoric about intuitive eating Anti diet learning to listen to your body. I just said eff it. This is what i'm going to do I am so sick of hearing these thoughts and listening to them about Dieting and carbs and fearing things i'm going to eat these foods. So I had a lot of oatmeal I had a lot of bread.

I had a lot of the things that I had never let myself have previously with the only understanding that I'm just going to listen to my body. This is super helpful for me because I was a chronic overeater. So during this time when I had a lot of space and I felt very safe, you know, I was living at home with my parents.

I didn't have to worry about paying bills. My new life had not yet begun as a young adult. So it was easier. I should say for me to sit and be with myself and say, Hmm, what is fullness actually feel like. What is this impulse to keep eating even though I'm satisfied? So I [00:04:00] slowly started working on this giving myself a ton of compassion and grace.

I was meditating a lot during this time So it helped me build that muscle of I can observe thoughts that I have saying you should eat more You're not gonna be able to eat more tomorrow. These carbs are bad. Sugar is the devil and just say thank you so much thoughts I'm gonna continue acting the way that I want to act

So I started to think, oh my gosh, I think I have it all figured out. I lost some weight naturally. Everything felt very peaceful. I felt like I have this food stuff handled. No, that is such a classic 22 year old thing to say, right? So I moved to Denver to begin my life as a public accountant, as a consultant, and partying came back in my life.

Everything became very chaotic in my life and all of my food stuff came right back. Started grasping for control. I was doing a lot of overeating, a lot binge drinking again, and it was chaos. And it wasn't until I had saved up money truly from the first day of that job. I just knew it Deep in my soul, it was not the right path for me.

I started saving up money and then I [00:05:00] quit my job two and a half years later and somehow convinced some girlfriends to go backpacking in Southeast Asia with me. And we had so much time and space to be with ourselves. during those three to four months. And it was truly the first time where I had to sit with myself and witness myself.

And I did not like what I saw. There were so many patterns and beliefs and behaviors and thoughts that I did not resonate with. And I didn't want to continue with going forward. during that time, I did a lot of deep inner work and it was extremely uncomfortable, but naturally things with food started to shift.

Some of the things I realized during this time were that my career, which I already knew, but I accepted that and admitted it to myself was not for me. I was on the wrong path, which meant. Oh my gosh, I need to figure out what is the right path for me, but still just accepting that part of myself that I wasn't meant for the typical path like so many other people were, was something that gave me a lot of relief.

I just had to accept myself. I realized that so many of my food patterns were rooted in [00:06:00] control and fear and low self esteem, low self worth. I felt like people only liked me for my appearance as most young women and young girls do receive that messaging. So I had to do a lot of unwinding and unraveling with that story as well.

And I had never connected with my body. I just used it as this thing that I have to deal with that is either a source of affirmation and acceptance in the world or a source of criticism. And separation from other people. It never dawned on me that this is my body and it belongs to me and I get to have a relationship with it.

So all of these things started to come together during those three to four months. And as I mentioned just before, things with food naturally started to shift. I was naturally eating when I was hungry, stopping when I was full. I would eat everything. I let go of all the food rules that I had and slowly but surely things started to feel peaceful.

So what are some of the things that I did more specifically beyond this point? Number one, and I'm going to share with you what I call the trifecta. And the first part of that is I [00:07:00] connected to myself. Connection is step one. You can't trust something that you're not connected to. So I had to connect to my body, start to understand its signals.

I was living from the neck up solely in my head, making decisions about food and my body up to that point. So when I started to say, okay, my body has. Thousands and thousands of years of wisdom backing it up, and my job is to give it the environment in which it can thrive. So that meant I actually had to treat it well, and this was a novel idea for me.

Oh my gosh, my body is something that deserves to be treated well. Who knew? When I was connecting with my body, I also had to sit with my emotions, which is where a lot of people get hung up is this fear of, I don't want to sit with myself and my body because strong feelings live there. And I get it. That is a slow process because your nervous system has not yet accepted that it's safe to do so.

So just go slowly, but it is absolutely essential. I like to tell myself, can I sit with this emotion for the X number of minutes? Let's say two minutes. It's going to take me to eat this thing to drown it out or whatever [00:08:00] your coping mechanism is. If that's gonna give you relief for three minutes from feeling the thing, can you just sit for three minutes and feel the emotion instead?

The second part of the trifecta is trusting. So once you are connected to your body, yourself, your inner world, right, you're getting familiar with who you are as a person, then you get to experiment and slowly start to trust yourself, your body, and food. And this feels scary at first. It absolutely does because your mind has convinced you that all of these things are the enemy.

Your body's the enemy. Your emotions are the enemy. Food is the enemy. It is not true. So you have to actively before you feel ready, take those scary action steps. This might look like, Hmm, it's noon. And typically I'm supposed to eat lunch at this time, but I'm still full or I'm not hungry. I'm going to push it back or the opposite.

It's 10 AM and I'm already hungry. And my head says, I'm supposed to wait until lunch and white knuckle it for two hours. No, you eat the thing. Now you satisfy your body's needs. Signals. And at the same time, as I mentioned, it's really [00:09:00] important that you're treating your body really well during this time because our body signals can get wonky if we are not treating our body well, right?

So if you are completely underslept and overstressed, you likely notice that you have a really strong increase in appetite. You have cravings, really strong cravings for foods that are not very good for you. It's difficult for your body to be in balance if you are not treating it well. So the better you treat your body.

Better your body feels like it's treating you when it's in reality always doing its best.

The third part of the trifecta is learning to respect myself and my body. Self worth, self respect. And this is such a huge part of this process. And you might be thinking, okay, I am overeating Oreos every night, or I can't stop eating a pint of ice cream every single night. And you're telling me self respect is the answer.

It's a huge part of it because you have to sit here and dig into why do I feel like I'm not worthy of taking care of myself really well. And I'm not talking, oh I need to get skinny and that's taking care of myself. No. I'm talking about the deep, [00:10:00] true care. If you were to consider how you would care for a child that you loved, would you let them just stay up till three in the morning every night?

No. You would say, It's not going to be good for you to be staying up till 3am on your phone. That's not good for your brain. It's not good for your nervous system. You're going to wake up exhausted. You're going to be an emotional mess the next day. You care about that child and you want the best for it, right?

You're also going to feed it vegetables. You're going to let it have time outside. It, the child, have time outside of nature. You're going to make sure that that child is connecting with other human beings. You're going to make sure that they're having nutrient dense foods. All of these things that you would do for a child, you need to start doing for yourself.

This also includes just beyond your body, your emotional wellbeing. Do you feel like you are someone who is worthy of having their emotions accepted? You have to be with yourself and learn that I deserve to be accepted as a whole entire human being. Body image plays a huge part in this as well. Do you feel like your only value in the world is the way that you look?

Are we just [00:11:00] solely these meat suits and that's all we bring to the table? Of course not. But you have to start to treat yourself as more than that. Some ways to do this. What do you focus on in your free time? Are you focused on being kind to yourself and others? Are you focused on learning, on hobbies, on becoming a well rounded human being, a woman who matters way, way beyond just her appearance?

There's so much more to you than that, 

And your brain will slowly stop obsessing over the food, the dieting, exercising, all of it, when it realizes that it is safe. to do so. And the way that happens is you taking the pressure off your appearance and focusing instead on who you are as a person and all the other aspects of your life that matter.

You want to focus on building a life, not building a body.

Some other things that I did. I stopped staring at myself in the mirror. There was a long period of time where I just said, putting my appearance to the side, I get dressed, quick glance that my outfit makes sense, that my makeup is not a complete mess, and then I move on with my life. And this [00:12:00] still has carried on to today, where sometimes I'll go to the bathroom at a restaurant, I just, Forgot to look at myself in the mirror and I have stuff all over my face, might have stuff in my teeth, but you know what?

It is so liberating to know that you are not defined by your appearance and you can exist in the world having fun with your appearance. If you're familiar with my work now, I do help women get leaner in a way that protects their relationship with food. But it's so important, which brings me to my next point, that you take time away from changing your body.

I would not have been able to develop the peaceful relationship with food where I just basically hit the reset button. I said, I just want to eat like a normal person if I did not put body or physique goals on the back burner. And I didn't give myself a timeline and say, okay, three months and then I'm going to jump right back to it.

No, I took honestly years and years away from it. That doesn't mean you have to, but I really strongly encourage you to say, I'm only going to return to those physique goals, which are completely fine. It's your body. You can do whatever you want with it. Once. My mind is [00:13:00] truly reset once food is calm, peaceful, enjoyable.

It's a source of pleasure. It's not a source of pain and guilt and shame and chaos.

I would also encourage you to get super clear on your own personal value system. This is something that we dive into at length inside of my food freedom evolution course, and it's a vitally important. What do you value? What things make you come alive versus what society tells you is important. And this can be a little bit jarring sometimes depending how far away you feel like you've gotten from your true self, but it is so incredibly liberating.

And once you start to piece all of these things together, the self respect, the connection, the trust, the values, you will notice that you become so much more confident because you finally know yourself. And once you know yourself, then you can leverage that confident version of yourself. But if you're just fumbling around through life as now a grown woman saying, I don't know how to feed myself, I don't know what my body says, what should I even want with my body?

They tell me to be muscular and then they tell me to be skinny. Carbs are good, [00:14:00] carbs are bad, don't eat high protein. That is so draining and it is taking up way too much brain space. To the point where you can't even show up as a full grown, powerful woman. It's more of that little girl mentality of someone come save me and tell me what to do.

The princess versus the queen. Elevating into that queen archetype requires that you do this deeper work. You really dig deep into who you are, why the root cause, why you are so obsessed with food and body and it's all rooted in fear, guilt, and shame. But I promise you, While this work might sound a little overwhelming, it will absolutely change your life and not just with food in your body.

I really hope this was helpful for you. And if you are aiming to improve your relationship with food and really just learn to eat like a normal woman, a grown woman who thrives when it comes to food and exercise and her body. I do have a full blown course called food freedom evolution, and you can find the details on that below, or you can just get started with the overeating training for just 11 also linked [00:15:00] below.

And I will see you in the next one.